Candy Crush Saga's developer goes public, loses almost $1 billion

0.phoneArena
27 Mar 2014, 10:36posted on

King, the developer behind the wildly-popular Candy Crush Saga, went public yesterday, but the price of its shares quickly fell below the $20 mark. The game company hoped to establish a market value of around $7.6 billion via an IPO (initial public offering) and it hoped to sell roughly 22 million shares priced at $22.50. However, the price of King's stocks quickly fell down 16% to $18.90, bringing the game developer's value to roughly $6 billion. The London-based company succeeded in selling just 15.5 million shares during the first day of its IPO...

It'll be a few years before that happens though. Even silly, small games can go big and gross millions immediately, because it's very easy to make in-app purchases with debit/credit cards that are stored on-file. The nature of the "easy purchase" makes these games explode.

It's similar to Bejeweled, except you can make combos out of any "same" pieces so long as they're adjacent in some way (as opposed to Bejeweled, where you could only connect combos in the cardinal directions and straight lines.

I hope it burns to cinders, they're right up there with Mobage, Gameloft, Glu Mobile and others when it comes to the extreme money pit economics of their microtransaction/in-app purchases. To me, mobile gaming is dead.

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